Another Good Bad Thing
When I heard Gene's Good Girl Gone Bad (1987) for the first time around 1992, I wasn't quite sure what to make of this song. I wasn't familiar with Kiss' 80s stuff for the most part, Crazy Nights seemed fresh to me but overall quite alienating, and my ears were pretty virgin as far as Judas Priest was concerned (1).
I was, I think, rather disappointed by it because it didn't sound like the Kiss, let alone the old Gene, that I remembered and held in my heart from the early days of being a fan, and had kinda fallen into the clumsy belief that Gene was just looking for different way of not to sound too much like the '70s stuff. Or that he was simply exposing himself as a lazy songwriter during this era (2).
And man, how right I was, and yet how little I knew.
But to get my Judas Priest act together, let's return to the present, because it wasn't too long ago that I probably consciously listened to their You've Got Another Thing Comin' (1982) for the first time in my life. And it was during the verses that the scales finally fell from my eyes.
If you listen to both rhythm guitars, both of course contain this archetypal chuka-chuka, or whatever it might be called, but I don't even mean that, because it's the vocals are what really matter to me, and that's exactly the for me unfamiliar component, namely Rob Halford's vocal style, when he actually sings and doesn't shriek garishly or tries to sound like a stone being crushed between two cramped metal ass cheeks, if you know what I mean.
And this is precisely the element that Gene fully immerses himself in in Good Girl Gone Bad and also embellishes this specific attitude thread, albeit to a somewhat more vibrant extent. Which is a bit like a pool cleaner trying to chop down a tree with the means at his disposal, but in this case it actually works - if only you are aware of what is happening there. Kinda.
Well, and now I have to dig through all that old Priest stuff, even though I haven't really been into metal for a very long time (3).
But what don't you do?
Side Notes:
(1) With the big exception of Painkiller (1990).
(2) After all, the promotion for Revenge (1992) at the time hardly left a good hair on Gene's 80s output, and I was still a relatively young person and at least as impressionable.
(3) What can I say, I've made quite a good find in the meantime.
Good Girl Gone Bad (1987)
You've Got Another Thing Comin' (1982)